# Hi, I'm building fivedaylaunch — a website studio for local service businesses > Source: > Published: 2026-07-11 20:29:21+00:00 I've been building [fivedaylaunch](https://fivedaylaunch.com) for the past couple of months. This is my first DEV post, so figured I'd share what we're doing and what I've been learning. ## The idea Local service businesses — plumbers, salons, cafes, dentists, photographers — usually end up in one of two bad spots: - Try Wix/Squarespace and give up after two weekends because they don't have time to learn a builder, or - Pay a local agency $2,500–$8,000 upfront for a site that still looks generic Neither is great. What we do instead: a real hand-designed website + owner portal delivered in 5 business days, starting at $25/mo. No upfront fee, no annual contract. If you want to see it, [try /instant](https://fivedaylaunch.com/instant) — put a business name in and you get a real preview site in 60 seconds. No signup, no card. ## The tech stack (probably more interesting to this crowd) - **Server:** Node.js + Express (customer portal) + a small Python service for AI-assisted content generation - **DB:** SQLite with WAL mode. Yes, in production. It's plenty for our current scale and eliminates a ton of ops overhead. - **Hosting:** the whole thing runs on a single 2 GB DigitalOcean droplet right now (~$12/mo). We'll horizontally scale when we outgrow it, not before. - **AI:** Claude Haiku for the daily content pipeline, with a template + heuristic fallback when determinism matters more than creativity - **Front-end:** hand-written HTML/CSS with a schema-driven templating layer. No React, no build step, no bundler. Ships in ~15 kB per page. Deliberately unfancy. When your daily customer volume is measured in the tens, boring tech is the correct choice. ## What I'll be writing about here - Small-business tech stack decisions - SQLite in production (I'll die on this hill) - AEO / GEO — getting your product cited by ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity, which is a different beast from classic SEO - Build-in-public updates from the studio If any of that sounds interesting, hit follow. And if you run a small business (or know someone who does), /instant is free to try.